This post requires some quick bit of context. First, for more than 10 years I’ve been using DVORAK as my main keyboard layout. Let’s skip the arguments about it being better than QWERTY or not; at this point I just like it, and my subjective experience is enough for me to keep using it (and as a programmer, I’ve found that it does give me easier access to characters that come up frequently when coding). Second, my native language is Spanish, and that’s what I type in when chatting with Spanish-speaking friends, among other things. Importantly, I write following the rules for accenting characters (á é í ó ú), and we also have the letter ñ, that doesn’t have its own key on the US QWERTY nor the DVORAK layouts, so I also configured the Spanish – Latin American layout so I can switch to it when necessary.

That said, I’ve known for a while that if I’m typing in Microsoft Word with the Dvorak layout, I’m able to use a couple of simple key combinations to type accented characters: Ctrl + ' followed by a vowel will produce the accented vowel, and Ctrl + Shift + ` (which is a ~) followed by n will produce ñ. But the same key combinations in any other application, would not work! I would only get unaccented vowels or the letter n. So when I’m chatting, doing a browser search, writing code comments in Spanish, etc, I frequently have to switch my keyboard layout within Windows to Spanish (at least I have Win + Space as a shortcut to do that), type my accents, and then go back to my main Dvorak layout. It completely breaks my flow while typing, and that’s pretty annoying.

Today I was playing with my new split, mechanical, can-remap-any-keys keyboard (the Dygma Raise, post about that probably coming soon), thinking about setting the Dvorak layout directly on it, and some funky interactions with the Windows keyboard layout made me decide to figure out the issue once and for all.

And that’s how I learned about dead keys. In a nutshell, there are keyboard layouts that define some of their keys in a way that clicking on them has no immediate effect, and instead they (potentially) modify what happens on the next keystroke. For example, the United States – International keyboard layout included in Windows treats the key for a single quote ' as a dead key: press it once and nothing happens, but if you then press a vowel you get an accented vowel (and if you press anything that does not have an accented version, you get the quote followed by whatever character came next, or just the quote if you pressed the space bar as the follow-up character). Same goes for the tilde ~ with the only difference that you have to start with Shift + ` to “press” the tilde dead key, and then pressing n produces ñ. Accents in the Spanish – Latin American layout work just like that too.

Now, here’s the thing: the United States – Dvorak layout that comes with Windows does not have any dead keys, so how come I’ve been using them for years in Microsoft Word? Well…

In Microsoft Word (and in most other text-input fields), using the Control key with a key that usually resembles the diacritic (e.g. ^ for a circumflex) acts as a dead key

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_key#Dead_keys_on_various_keyboard_layouts

Aha! So Word makes an effort to be smart no matter your actual layout, but other applications can’t be bothered (since they’re not text processors, I guess I don’t blame them).

At this point a solution was brewing in my mind. I knew that the standard US keyboard layout that comes with Windows does not have dead keys, but that the United States – International layout does (precisely because it caters to users who might need “international characters” like accented ones). And I vaguely remember having had, or read about, a Dvorak – International layout, which hopefully does the same thing. I couldn’t find one among the layouts included with Windows, but a Google search confirmed that there’s several such layouts created by different people, which provide dead-key support in different ways (sometimes in the same way as the United States – International layout, sometimes using Ctrl as Word does, sometimes both), and are generally easy to install.

I’m not sure if I’ll go with that solution for my particular problem, but I’m pretty confident it would work. The fact that I can remap keys in my keyboard’s firmware allows me to create the Dvorak layout there, and permanently use the United States – International layout in Windows, which has dead key support… so I might just stick with that for now. But if you want to support any physical keyboard and be able to type accents on a Dvorak layout, your best bet is to find and install an “international version” for it, with dead key support.